I have been spending an unreasonable amount of time lately reading things written by a younger version of myself who apparently believed the internet was both a diary and a storage locker and, to be fair to him, he was right. The whole point of digging through Adam At Last and the little side roads around it has been to see what twenty-year-old me left behind, compare it to what forty-five-year-old me thinks happened, and then stand between the two of them like a mildly annoyed referee saying, “Okay, which one of you is full of shit?” Sometimes the answer is both of us. Sometimes the archive wins. Sometimes my memory wins. And sometimes I find a piece of a puzzle I did not even know I was solving.

A while back I found an old page called Email Beginings, because spelling was apparently optional in 2001 and Young Adam was not going to let a second “n” stand between him and history. Buried in it was an enormous AOL Instant Messenger conversation between me and a woman named Amy Grennell. I think that is how she spelled her last name. This is one of those stupid things my brain refuses to hold onto with confidence; Grennel, Grenell, Grennell some nearby arrangement of n’s and l’s. So, Amy, if I am mangling your name twenty-five years later, I am sorry before we even get to the part where I owe you a much larger apology.

I knew exactly who Amy was as soon as I saw the screen name: AmyJG. The J was Joy. That part came back instantly. What did not come back was the conversation itself, because my brain has shit for brains sometimes, which is one of the primary reasons I am doing all of this archive work in the first place. I had no recollection that Amy and I had ever seriously discussed getting back together after our original relationship ended. None. Zip. The transcript was right there, hundreds of messages long, and I was reading myself doing something I did not remember doing. It sounded completely like me. The jokes sounded like me. The overthinking sounded like me. The way I could turn “maybe I still like this girl” into a philosophical crisis about the mechanics of human behavior absolutely sounded like me. I recognized the person in the transcript more clearly than I remembered the event he was describing.

At first I treated the chat as a fascinating artifact on its own. There I was, at twenty, talking to an old girlfriend, joking about marriage and money and sex, talking about faith, talking about the breakup, and eventually circling around the question of whether we should try again. I learned a bunch from it, filed some of it away, and kept moving through Adam At Last. Then I got to a post from April 25, 2001 called “on and on.” And suddenly the whole thing snapped together.

i spent last night talking to an old friend. we talked a lot about familiarity, and how it keeps people together.

Well, shit.

Because the AOL chat I had already found contains an entire conversation about familiarity. Not vaguely. Not thematically. Literally. Amy says that one of the reasons the idea of us getting back together has been on her mind is that we know so much about each other. At one point she says I knew her “inside out,” and that she loved that. Later, when I ask what the reason would even be for us to get together again, she gives the answer: familiarity. Then we sit there and debate whether familiarity is a bad thing, because apparently twenty-year-old Adam could not simply have an emotion when he could instead organize a late-night symposium about it.

The Adam At Last post gets even more specific. I say I am sitting there “re-reading the conversation (it took place thanks to aol) and the emails that followed.” At the end of the recovered chat, Amy tells me she has just written me an email and sends it before signing off. I had not merely found a chat that resembled the blog post. I had found the conversation I was sitting there rereading when I wrote the blog post the next night. I found the answer before I knew there was a question. It was exciting in exactly the way finding one piece of a puzzle you didn’t know you were solving is exciting: suddenly two random objects sitting on the table stop being random.

To understand why this mattered so much, you need to know who Amy was, which is where my memory becomes both useful and deeply annoying. I remember Amy. I do not remember nearly enough about Amy. She came down to Ecola Bible School with another friend, who I think may also have been named Amy, to visit Natalie and probably meet Elton. Natalie and Elton were my people, so naturally we all hung out together. It was one of those weekends where a new person enters your little social world and, by the time everyone goes home, the shape of the room has changed. I fell for Amy over that short visit. We exchanged information (or maybe Natalie gave me her contact info after, that’s where the shit for brains memory comes in), she went home to Stanwood, and then we started talking through the one computer I had access to in the Ecola office. I had a small amount of computer time each day. There was no phone in my pocket, no endless texting, no FaceTime, no little green dot saying she was available every second of the day. There was a box in an office, and for a short window the box could connect me to Amy.

In fact, the recovered 2001 chat contains another little relic from the original relationship. Amy tells me she remembers something I had written years earlier about a “box,” the box being the computer between us, and a phrase that kept coming back to her: “it is by chance we met.” That is almost absurdly appropriate. We did meet by chance. She came to visit Natalie. I happened to be there. Then the relationship itself grew inside that box. Before finding this transcript I was maybe 90% certain that Amy and I officially became a couple through AOL Instant Messenger because we almost never saw each other in person. After reading twenty-year-old me suddenly stop the reunion conversation with “wait, this is how it happened last time” and insist that if anything happens again it should happen in person instead of over the computer, I am one 100% certain. We became a couple through AOL IM. The internet got us together the first time and, two years later, Young Adam was apparently smart enough to notice that he was about to do the exact same thing again.

Long distance was not a cute label for us. I was in Cannon Beach. Amy was in Stanwood. We might see each other once a month, sometimes less. In January 1999 she was the fourth person in the car for the Bellingham trip I wrote about in “I Felt It Shift,” the night Elton took me to see Seldom, Damien Jurado, Pedro the Lion, and Death Cab for Cutie and accidentally redirected a huge part of my musical life. Elton and Natalie were one couple. Amy and I were the other. I remember that weekend now much better as a music story than as an Amy story, which is another example of my brain keeping the furniture and throwing out the people who were sitting on it. But Amy was there. She was part of that night. Seeing her alone would have made the ridiculous drive worthwhile to me.

What do I remember about her? She was funny. Sweet. Gentle. Smart. Beautiful. She had good taste in music, which obviously mattered because I was becoming the kind of person who believed your record collection might be admissible evidence in determining whether you were morally compatible with me. She was also a really good kisser, which I include because this is history and history demands accuracy. More importantly, though, she wanted the same things I thought I wanted. We talked a lot about marriage. We talked about kids. We talked about building a good, “godly” family life together. I do not remember the details of whatever future we planned, but I am sure we planned one. We were eighteen, which is of course the traditional age when humans are famous for having a complete understanding of what the next sixty years should look like.

There is a funny purity-culture artifact in the recovered chat too. At one point Amy says she and a friend saw “your ring in a book at work,” and that ever since then she had been thinking about us. That almost certainly means my Claddagh ring. My parents had given it to me a few years earlier as a purity ring. I wore it facing inward because that meant my heart was taken. By Jesus. Purity Culture was crazy, man. Jesus was apparently the official ring taker until I got married, at which point I guess my wife would join him in some kind of co-ownership arrangement. Amy and I were very much two good Christian kids. We also had functioning endocrine systems. We talked about physical boundaries and then pushed against some of them with considerable enthusiasm. We never had intercourse or oral sex, but there was plenty of what previous generations politely called heavy petting. We felt a little shame about it, because that was the water we were swimming in, but we had also seriously discussed marriage, which made “we’re going to get married anyway” a very convenient theological loophole. We were good kids. We were also horny as hell. Both things were true.

A few happy scenes survive. Amy and I took an afternoon drive down Highway 101 once, stopped at a lookout, sat there watching the water and kissed a lot. That is one of the clearest little pieces I still have of us just being together. Another time she came to my parents’ house with Liam and Karen, who was Liam’s girlfriend then, they ended up getting married, I visited them and their dog a few months prior to this conversation. Liam and I decided we were going to cook dinner for the girls. This took a gastronomical epoch. I do not know what we were making or why two young men required an era of geologic time to produce it, but I remember us blocking Amy and Karen from coming into the kitchen and them repeatedly refusing to leave us alone. It was fun. We laughed. Dinner eventually emerged sometime before the heat death of the universe.

And then there is the breakup, which for years was the part my brain preserved in high definition while letting almost everything around it rot away.

Amy had driven all the way down from Stanwood to spend the weekend with me. We were walking on the beach alone one night. I wanted to sit on a sand dune and talk. She wanted to keep walking. That is the entire inciting incident as far as I can remember. So I got up and said something like, “You’re boring. I want to break up.” Then I turned around and walked back toward campus. I do not remember whether I went to the lounge, my dorm, or somewhere else. I do not think we talked much after that. I think she got in her car and drove home.

I was horrible to her. There is no clever archival reinterpretation coming that makes that sentence untrue. She had driven hours to see me. We had talked about marriage and kids and a future. Then I apparently had a weird thought burst out of my brain and treated it like a legally binding declaration instead of the stupid impulse it was. I regretted it almost immediately. I have regretted it my whole life. I never found a satisfying reason for why I did it. Eighteen-year-old Adam can take a loving poke from me now, but this is not one of the places where I want to turn him into a lovable idiot and let him off the hook. He hurt someone who trusted him.

And then, twenty-five years later, I read the AOL transcript and found out that Amy still remembered the exact wound.

AmyJG: i bored you
adam at last: yeah
AmyJG: that’s # 1

Oof.

That little exchange landed harder than almost anything else in the transcript because it showed me that my stupid sentence on the beach had become part of the story she carried about why we ended. I do not know what that moment did to her in the long term, and I do not want to write a dramatic life-defining injury into Amy’s biography just because I have carried shame about causing it. That would be making her pain about me again. But I can say this: two years later, when we took inventory of the relationship, “I bored you” was the first thing she named.

I am sorry, Amy. That version of me was a child, and I treated you terribly. I have wondered for years how much that night stayed with you. I hope, wherever life took you, that whatever hurt I caused stopped hurting a long time ago.

---

Here is where this archive find did something unexpectedly kind for me, though. For years, the version of the story my memory kept was basically: I loved Amy, I broke her heart in an ugly and inexplicable way, I regretted it immediately, and then she disappeared into the past. I had already forgiven eighteen-year-old me a long time ago. The thing I still worried about was her. What did I leave her with? Did I just wound someone I really cared about and then vanish from her story?

Apparently not.

My memory of the years after the breakup is a mess. Amy apparently went to Ecola the following school year, something I had completely forgotten until this dig. At the same time I was living in Seaside, so our worlds overlapped and we saw each other now and then. I do not know how constant our friendship was. There are weird little surviving scraps. I remember Amy telling me about a friend she reported to the police because he pushed his car into a lake to collect the insurance money. I remember that she made friends with the detectives and called them “My Detectives.” I was just getting into Elvis Costello then, as a good indie rocker was apparently required to do, so “Watching the Detectives” was in my ears constantly. To this day, whenever I hear that song, I think of Amy. Useful chronology? Gone. “My Detectives”? Permanent. Again: my brain has shit for brains.

I also suspect we may have seen each other at Natalie’s wedding in December 2000. I know I was there because I wrote about the trip the next morning in “stateroad to stanwood.” I do not have documentary evidence that Amy was there and I do not have a solid memory of seeing her, so I am leaving that exactly where it belongs: plausible, not proven. Maybe that wedding helped put us back into each other’s orbit. Maybe we had already been talking. Maybe nothing dramatic happened at all and friendship just resumed in little pieces. The old Juno and Hotmail mailboxes that might have answered some of this are gone. I have looked. The internet giveth and the internet, frequently, says “account no longer existeth.”

By April 24, 2001, though, whatever path got us there, we were talking again. Really talking. And we fell immediately into an easy rhythm that feels familiar even though I cannot honestly tell you whether it matched the way we had been as a couple, because I barely remember that rhythm either. The chat starts with ridiculous marriage banter. I say I finally have enough money to get married and that being married would help me financially with school, which is one of those flawlessly romantic proposals that makes you wonder why I remained single at any point in my life. Amy points out that she has a car and a house. I tell her we can pool our money and become a “super family.” Somewhere in there we establish that if we get married I would at least like to have sex once in a while. You know, adult planning.

Then the jokes start becoming real.

adam at last: how would it be if we gave it another go?
AmyJG: what are you saying
adam at last: just posing the thought
adam at last: not asking anything (yet)

I do not know how to read my own line now with perfect confidence. Was I seriously asking for her back? Was I testing whether the door was still open? Probably some combination. I know I regretted breaking up with her almost instantly, so it stands to reason that some part of me genuinely wanted another chance. The transcript certainly does not read like a guy casually poking an old girlfriend for ego points. I ask whether she has thought about it recently. She says she has. I tell her I spent the whole drive home thinking about it. We go through the reasons we had failed. Music, lifestyle, clothing, distance, me apparently believing she was boring. I tell her I do not think those things matter as much anymore. She tells me she has changed. I tell her I have changed. There is chemistry all over the conversation, and not just because we are joking about sex. We know each other. We know where the old bruises are. We know how to make each other laugh. That desire to be seen and cherished by someone is one of the things that still motivates me now, and it is all over this conversation. Amy knew me very well, even though we had only been together a few months. We got to know each other inside and out.

There is a moment where Amy says she and a friend saw a ring like mine in a book at work and, ever since, she had been thinking about us. There is my ridiculous Jesus Claddagh again, apparently doing relationship work while sitting nowhere near my actual hand. Then I have the sudden realization that this is beginning exactly the way our first relationship began.

adam at last: wait, this is how it happened last time
adam at last: if anything is going to happen, i want it to be in person, not over the computer again

That is such a perfect little piece of evidence. The first time around, AOL was the bridge because we barely saw each other. Now, two years later, the same bridge was starting to rebuild the same house and even I could see the hazard sign. I suggest we spend a day together and “test the waters.” Amy says maybe. In the blog post the next night I make a cryptic reference to asking someone to come to town early and maybe seeing them, maybe not. Did we actually meet up? I have no idea. There may be evidence somewhere. There may not. I do not remember it.

And that is the thing I want to underline because it is the weirdest part of all of this: finding the evidence did not restore the memory. I still do not have a solid recollection of sitting at a computer in April 2001 talking to Amy about getting back together. I know it happened because I can read it. I know I wrote the next-night commentary because I can read that too. I can follow the logic. I can see why it made sense. I can recognize myself in every sentence. But the lived scene is still missing. The archive has given me knowledge about my own life that my autobiographical memory refuses to turn back into experience.

That is basically the whole reason I am doing this project. My brain does not erase people cleanly. It keeps strange things. It kept the lookout on 101. It kept the kitchen dinner that took a gastronomical epoch. It kept “My Detectives.” It kept how much I liked Amy. It kept the shame of that night on the beach. What it did not keep was the fact that the story continued. The worst scene survived so vividly that it clouded almost everything after it out.

But it was not the ending.

Two years after I treated Amy like shit on that beach, we were still talking. We were joking. We were friends. We could discuss what happened. We still had chemistry. We knew each other well enough that “familiarity” itself became the argument for why maybe trying again was not completely insane. That does not erase the hurt I caused. It does not mean she was fine. It does not give me a retroactive pardon I was not asking for. What it gives me is peace about something else: the worst thing I remember doing to Amy was not the last thing we ever were to each other.

And apparently twenty-year-old me knew this conversation mattered, because Amy signed off at 12:06:08 AM and the preserved page says I posted the chat at 12:14. Eight minutes later. I saved a few chats with Josh Duff back then, but nothing else I have found quite like this. Young Adam had strange archival tendencies. He had not yet sculpted them into anything resembling a coherent process. There was no master database, no source ledger, no obsessive cross-reference system, no Wygle Wide Web. There was just a kid occasionally looking at something and thinking, for reasons he did not bother to explain to Future Adam, I should save this.

Thank god he did.

I am not sitting here having a cry over a lost relationship or imagining some alternate universe where Amy and I stayed together and everything unfolded differently. I am mostly delighted. I found a little piece of my life. The J in AmyJG is Joy, and recovering this brought me joy. It gave Amy back some dimension beyond the terrible way I remembered ending things. It gave twenty-year-old me back a chapter I did not know he had lived. It gave me relief that the shame I had lightly carried for years did not need to include the assumption that I had hurt this person and then simply vanished from her life forever. We found our way back to something good, even if I cannot remember exactly what that something was.

I only wish I remembered more.

But maybe that is why this is fun. Sometimes the archive does not hand me a memory. Sometimes it hands me proof that my life was bigger than the version my brain kept. Sometimes it lets me find a piece of a puzzle I did not know I was solving.

Oh, and Amy, if you do actually use the internet and somehow stumble across this, shoot up a flare for this detective. I’d really love to know where life took you.